Jennifer Lewis honored for outstanding teaching

Jennifer Lewis, Ph.D., has been appointed as the inaugural Jianming Yu Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). As a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Lewis’ research focuses on the design and fabrication of functional, structural, and biological materials, and her pioneering work in the field of microscale 3D printing is advancing the development of electronics, soft robotics, lightweight structures, and vascularized human tissues.

“This honor means a great deal to me, as it not only recognizes my own research and teaching contributions, but those of my research group and our collaborators,” said Lewis.

With her new chair, Lewis plans to advance her work building organ-specific tissues for drug screening, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine, while giving her students hands-on experience.

“I love introducing students to the foundational concepts that govern the structure, properties, and processing of biomaterials as well as their myriad applications, including contact lenses, hip implants, and drug delivery,” she said. “It is especially rewarding when you see your students making connections between these applications and the underlying scientific principles at play.”

This honor means a great deal to me, as it not only recognizes my own research and teaching contributions, but those of my research group and our collaborators.

Jennifer Lewis

In 2017, Lewis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her research on the design and fabrication of functional, structural, and biological materials. She is an inventor with dozens of pending or issued patents, and founder of Voxel8, a startup company that commercialized the first multimaterial 3-D printing for fabrication of embedded electronics.

Michael D. Smith, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, created the FAS professorship program in 2012 at the beginning of the Harvard Campaign for Arts and Sciences to recognize scholarly achievement at the highest level within FAS. In addition to Lewis, Smith has also named Catherine Dulac, the Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Louis Menand, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English; and Mary C. Waters, the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology, as Jianming Yu Professors of Arts and Sciences at FAS.

A full story about the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Professors can be found on the Harvard Gazette.

One of the many projects Jennifer Lewis is working on, hybrid 3D printing of soft electronics could rapidly accelerate the design and additive manufacturing of customized, wearable electronic devices. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University